The US Empire's Economic Chickens Come Home to Roost

Bringing the "War on Terror" with them

The US and European empires have enjoyed the literal fruits of pillage and plunder for centuries. Millions have been enslaved and massacred to funnel distant commodities such as Honduran bananas and Congolese rubber to the final targets of imperialism, the citizens of the empire. Accessing cheap resources and labor allowed the elite ruling class unlimited profits and unimaginable power. The access to cheap products and a reasonably comfortable lifestyle coupled with a wholly owned corporate media kept the citizens fully propagandized, well fed, and reasonably quiet.

The post World War 2 economy, from 1945 until 1980, produced a vibrant middle class in the West. Unfortunately, this also created the false impression that the Western elite class preferred a prosperous society in which the proverbial rising tide would lift all boats. As neoliberal policies would eventually demonstrate, this was the opposite of reality. The truth was that FDR’s new deal was viciously opposed by the corporate rulers so much so that they conspired to overthrow his government in an illegal coup. The masters of corporate power have successfully focused their resources and political capital on undoing policies that created and protected workers and poor people ever since. Having successfully seized control of the US political machine, their system has produced a level of oligarchical wealth that the world has never known.

It is my belief that the lopsided power dynamic of a US led hegemonic empire remained viable because the military and economic machines that it commanded were overwhelming and more importantly, because the citizens of the empire experienced some level of economic benefit from it. The true threats to this empire have always been the closely related issues of inept leadership and internal revolt. Paradoxically, the paranoia and greed of the the ruling elite moved them to seize political power, install inept puppets in the highest levels of government, and interconnect their corporate power structure with a brutal national security complex that guaranteed the eventuality of the very internal uprisings they so feared.

The attack on 9/11, an event that is still befogged in unanswered questions and contradictions, created the opportunity that the worst souls of empire coveted. Neocons leapt upon the opportunity to demonstrate their new brand of technological warfare while seizing nations at the heart of the world’s most valuable natural resources. The twin invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were the opening salvos of a plan to seize the entire Middle East. While that plan was never fully realized, it was effective in bringing to power a class of amoral politicians that value raw military and economic power as the most essential tools of foreign policy. The neocon game of world wide aggression was up and running and the Wolfowitz doctrine of full spectrum dominance would doom us to eventually face this deadly showdown with modernity. There was no room in the neocon playbook for the inevitable rise of Russia and China.

The deadly combination of inept corporate installed political leadership and an expectation of unipolar world domination has led the Biden Administration to pull the trigger on a package of sanctions that have already began to backfire. It was widely reported that US and EU leaders were warned of potential catastrophic blowback if they enacted harsh sanctions against one of the world’s top producers of food, energy, and raw materials. Foolishly, many believed that cooler heads would prevail and the sanctions would be limited to areas less likely to disrupt global commerce. Unfortunately, there are no cooler heads in Washington and Brussels and the Ukraine crisis invited a frenzy of “hair on fire” rhetoric and sanctions the likes of which few economists could have predicted. The blowback has been immediate as the price of energy has skyrocketed and the credible fear of runaway inflation is very much justified. If nothing is done to mitigate the dramatic volatility in the markets, and the likelihood of that is remote, recession is almost certain. Moreover, unintended consequences such as capital flight from West to East and the death of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency are setting up a scenario in which the economic foundation of the Western world could collapse. If the bond market fails and the pension system goes belly up the fallout is unthinkable. A financialized economic system in which a few masters of power command immense fortunes that are founded in magical financial tools such as derivatives and asset backed securities is in no condition to overcome the loss of reasonably priced energy and resources. Likewise, a political leadership class chock full of comically incompetent corporate puppets will be wholly unable to address the elephantine political and social instability created by an intense and sudden bout of poverty that they willingly inflict on the masses.

The time has arrived when the citizens of the US led empire may fully experience the pain that the greed and narcissism of the robber barons has inflicted on Africa, the Global South, and beyond for generations. The people’s anger and inevitable pushback is certain to be met with brutal physical repression and relentless online censorship. It’s possible that America’s next war will not be with an external adversary. Quite possibly, the brutal and merciless national security state’s push against “domestic terrorism” will be used to quell the hungry, impoverished, and furious masses that the empires irrational foreign policy is in the process of creating.